swansont

Because the founding fathers understood the issue of minority rights, but the concept apparently didn't make it in to the California constitution. Amending the constitution should be hard to do. The various opinions posted here only serve to underscore that.

Looking at the US Federal level here; I can't think of a single amendment that restricts the rights of only a subset of the population. (The original Constitution, of course, had such wording). Am I missing anything? The one thing that surprises me about Prop 8 is realizing that you can amend the California constitution with a simple majority. Minorities can't really be secure in their rights if the majority can eliminate them on a whim.

But the power isn't a constant, and I think that's where the confusion comes in. If you increase the voltage, and thus the current, the power increases.

The polarization is not a description of the light's trajectory, it's a description of what's happening to the E vector with time. Put another way, the angular momentum vector is either aligned or anti-aligned with the direction of propagation. This makes it right-handed or left-handed. The light has a helicity.

Assuming early life forms actually have asses.

That's my thinking.

He demonstrated that what we perceive as gravity is due to the curvature of space.

I think Einstein's discussion is a little more subtle. He was saying that space is not nothingness — it has properties. The problem with using the term "ether" to describe the properties of space at this point is that you run into confusion with the original lumineferous ether that represents the preferred reference frame. You have to continually remind people which ether you're talking about.

Why? Is there an unanswered question here?

Circularly polarized light can have different atomic interactions than linearly polarized light, or circular polarization in the opposite direction.

That's because they can't lock the bedroom door, which leaves them vulnerable to interruption (i.e. by a predator).

The actual charge motion imparted by the battery is quite slow, however.

If the sphere is rigid, wouldn't this just be a constant?

Technically, they were trying to measure our speed through it; since the observation of stellar parallax meant we weren't at rest, the null result of M-M ended up disproving the ether.

D'oh! Yeah, I inverted that.

It's not really a situation you can interpret classically. The attraction or repulsion are both possible in the quantum treatment. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/virtual_particles.html

Yes. Photons have angular momentum (spin of 1), and the spin vector is aligned (or anti-aligned) with the propagation vector, and you can polarize the beam as you stated. more: http://physics.unl.edu/~tgay/content/CPE.html

I think the the confusion here is that "electromagnetic force" conjures the image of an electro-magnet, and there is no magnetic interaction in this case. It is perfectly fine to call it the electromagnetic force; as Klaynos has stated, it's in Maxwell's equations — the two forces are trivially unified. A purely electrostatic effect (such as this) will have a magnetic component in another frame of reference, where the charge on the comb will be in motion.

Space is expanding. The visible universe is larger than 13.7 billion light years across.

How much bigger does an object appear to be in the magnifying glass than with the naked eye, when they are the same distance from your eye? (Usually 25 cm is used, as a convention, for this measurement)

If there was no drag, what would the speed vs time graph look like? How can you vary this in a simple measurement? What will the graph look like with drag?

No, you can't remove the charge. But a proton is made up of quarks, and you have other particles that have a charge of +1e. So "the proton IS charge" doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.

Power is the rate at which energy is transferred. Energy is power*time. The robot running at half-power takes twice as long to do the task. The energy is the same.

If you want to calculate the energy an object has, or energy it needs to do something, that answer is valid only in the frame in which you do the calculation. You have your planet, and a rocket out in space, initially at rest with respect to each other. The planet's mass is 10^25 kg, and the rocket's is 10^3 kg. The rocket fires, and starts moving at 1 m/s. It now has 500 Joules of energy. But someone in the rocket sees that planet moving, and having 5 x 10^24 Joules of energy — but the two numbers were calculated in different reference frames. You can't compare them. So your analysis in the first part of post 21 is invalid. —— Two protons moving at .99c with respect to me. In their own frame are at rest with respect to each other. ——— Never use relativistic mass. It rapidly leads to confusion.

I missed this one on the first pass. Wow. No, absolutely not. Gravity has nothing* to with atoms staying together. *OK, exceedingly little — the energy of interaction is somewhere around 10^-30 eV, whereas electromagnetic interactions on the atomic level are eV-ish. The gravitational perturbation of the earth is larger by more than 20 orders of magnitude)